


Prelude to Submersion

by writerdragonfly



Series: an ever present destiny [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-07-22
Packaged: 2018-07-26 03:12:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7557913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerdragonfly/pseuds/writerdragonfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Sheppard doesn't think he'll ever come online.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prelude to Submersion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [respoftw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/respoftw/gifts).



> I wasn't going to post this yet, but then I saw that there were 9,999 McShep fics on AO3 and decided to post early. 
> 
> This WILL be followed up by a full sized sequel. (:

When he was a child, he used to ask his mother every night to tell him the story of Sun and Moon, and how they created the first Sentinel and Guide.

 

He’d been tested, back when he was eight or nine. He and David both had. It was before their mother had gotten sick, when things had still been happy.

 

He wore his sticker for two days straight before he taped it to his wallet for safe-keeping. _I AM A LATENT SENTINEL. Ask me how to get tested!_

 

David had gotten one that said _LATENT GUIDE_.

 

He didn't think about how much it read like propaganda until he was much older.

 

But he still had the sticker. He’d gotten in laminated in college and kept in his safety deposit box.

 

He had David’s too. His brother had thrown it away.

 

-x-

 

He met his first Sentinel when he was four years old--the first one he remembered anyway.

 

He had wandered off away from his parents in a public park while his mother was getting David strapped into his stroller. His father had a picnic basket over his arm and was pulling out the blankets.

 

John had seen the planes. Great big planes swooping overhead like birds.

 

He followed them as fast as his little legs could, watching their wings slice across the bright blue sky.

 

“Hey, little guy. Your mommy and daddy are looking for you.”

 

The teenage Sentinel had brought him back to his parents, who pulled him close. John remembers the way his mother’s sweater smelled and the way his father’s lips felt when they brushed a kiss on his forehead in far more detail than the Sentinel that found him on the other side of the park.

 

-x-

 

John thinks he's going to burst online at any second twelve times when he's on active duty in the Air Force. One of those times, he's being tortured.

 

It doesn't happen.

 

-x-

 

When John is sixteen, he thinks he's going to come online while having sex with Stephanie for the first time.

 

When he's seventeen, he thinks, maybe it will happen with William.

 

It doesn't.

 

-x-

 

When his mom first gets sick, he's eleven and David is nine.

 

He doesn't really have a comparison for _sick_ like this. At first, he doesn't really understand.

 

And then his maternal grandfather has a heart attack and dies when he's twelve.

 

Suddenly his mother's sickness is the most terrifying thing to ever happen to him.

 

But he still doesn't come online.

 

He's not even thinking about that at the time though.

 

-x-

 

She dies three weeks before David’s eleventh birthday and two months before John’s thirteenth.

 

He doesn't understand why he doesn't come online after the worst day of his life to date.

 

-x-

 

His relationship with Nancy goes like this. Boy meets girl. Girl punches Boy for sexist  comment. Boy asks her out with a nosebleed. Girl laughs her ass off. Boy goes home alone. Three weeks later, Girl picks him up in a bar. Girl repeatedly picks him up on various bars until they fall madly in love. Boy proposes before shipping overseas. Girl marries him. Girl realizes that on any one of these dangerous classified ops, Boy could come online and leave her for his guide. Girl divorces Boy without warning.

 

But in the end, he doesn't even blame her.

 

-x-

 

John doesn't wait to come online anymore. He doesn't really try to have a relationship anymore either.

 

There isn't any point. At his age, no one he could fall in love with would believe that he's not going to find his Guide at any moment.

 

-x-

 

When he joined the Air Force, his dad told him that he was wasting his life.

 

“I'm in my forties and I’m still latent,” he’d said, and “You can design planes for me,” and “Damn it, John.”

 

-x-

 

John doesn't expect to come online. There's no point. It hasn't happened, he hasn't felt anything remotely like what they say it's like... and John is tired of waiting.

 

-x-

 

And then he sits in a chair in Antarctica, and it feels like a song vibrating just underneath his fingers and an ocean just past his nose and chocolate on the tip of his tongue and color exploding in the shapes of planets in front of his eyes and like clear blue skies ahead in the voice speaking to him. _Major, think about where we are in the solar system_.

 

So he does.

 

-x-

 

John doesn't come online then, in the Chair.

 

But for the first time in years, he thinks, _maybe there's hope yet_.


End file.
